


Never-Contented Things!

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Kissing in the Rain, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24310486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: After her accident, Raven moves out to a small town on the edge of the forest, and begins working in a coffee shop, which is often patronized by queer folk.One evening, one of them follows her home.
Relationships: Octavia Blake/Raven Reyes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32
Collections: Chopped 1.0 Round 1





	Never-Contented Things!

**Author's Note:**

> This was my initial idea for Chopped 1.0 Round 1, for which I ultimately wrote a different Raven/Octavia story, _Moon Lights Up the Night_.
> 
> The theme for this round was Fluff and the tropes were: coffee shop au; one character is a mythical creature; one character teaches the other to do something, which requires them to touch; and kiss in the rain.
> 
> I don't even know if this fic would qualify for the actual competition because it's not that fluffy (?? I guess??) and the coffee shop aspect is fairly minimal. Oh well! That's how it turned out.
> 
> The title is from the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Fairy-Land."

"Just remember to keep your eyes open," Raven's new boss tells her, as he throws a set of silver keys over the counter. "We have a lot of queer folks around these parts. You don't want to be caught off guard."

"I think I can handle it," she answers, with easy confidence, and traps the keys between her hands. Her boss just grunts. She thinks at the time that he means _queer_ in the same sense that she is _queer_ —not quite suited for a conventional life and unusual in love—and so she hardly gives the word a second thought. Life is coming together, perhaps. The keys fit neatly on her key ring, next to her house key and her car key and the strange little golden key she found in her kitchen drawer on the day that she moved in, and the coffee shop feels already cozy and warm, like a place that she’s known a long time. Gold-inflected light falls in abstract pattern through the windows, flecked with lazy dust motes in the sun beams. Customers who know the place sit at round wooden tables, with their drinks, with their solitude, occasionally pairs of them talking in whispers over dark brown ceramic mugs and coffee-splattered saucers. The air smells like dark brew and, underneath, the slightest hint of fresh-baked bread, and her new boss looks like a giant who's been scaled down incorrectly, his beard too long and his arms too large, and his whole body ill-placed behind the counter as he watches for the door, with its dirt-streaked windows, to open and let in another oddity from the street.

They are oddities, the customers, Raven learns in time—some of them. Queer, in certain just-off ways. The blonde woman with the little trill of laughter who pays in golden coins, and the men in dark coats and hats whose faces, later, she finds she cannot properly recall. Some people bring with them gusts of wind that smell like winter trying to intrude itself upon spring. She does not like the groups that huddle in circles just beyond her field of vision, does not like how they seem to be always laughing, or chattering just under their breath. She does not like the way she sometimes sees, or thinks she sees, a flick or flash as she hands a drink across the counter, how some people want to hold her gaze just a little bit too long.

But most people, she finds, are just as they should be, and sometimes whole days pass on a swift and even current, like water eddying around smooth, low riverbed stones.

Still, she always counts the money twice before she locks up, staving off a sense of uncertainty around the numbers, how nothing can be perfectly pinned down anymore.

And she makes her rounds, twice, around the shop, cleaning off the tables, checking the locks on the windows and the doors. She works the late shift three times a week, which means she is the last one left at the end of the day, the keeper of the quiet and the stillness as she unties her apron from around her waist, and hangs it on the peg at the back of the shop, and stands for a moment in front of the counter and lets the solitude seep into her, as she never used to do. She steals away and hoards the seconds she used to let slip past her unhindered and unheeded, because she promised herself that she would.

This is a challenge she has set herself, harder sometimes than throwing away that old life was, than the accident was, than re-learning her body was. In these moments she feels not so different from the wisp-like women who sit by the window, from the men with crooked smiles and beetle eyes, from every customer she sees and wonders later if she did not see. She checks her keys again, checks the corners and the countertop again. She wonders what sort of trace, or memory, she will leave behind her when she's gone.

*

The sky is dense with rainclouds, turned royal purple in the twilight, when Raven locks up at the end of the day. This process takes time and cannot be rushed; each key must be turned just so. But the ritual has become familiar and, in its familiarity, soothing, like letting go of a deep held breath that's been aching too long in her lungs. When she's done, she slips the key ring back into her pocket, and turns around, and heads home.

The coffee shop is near the end of Main Street, just at the edge of the village. Travel much farther and the road turns to dirt. The forest encroaches. Raven could drive to work but she prefers, especially in the warm, full days of spring, to walk. Taking her time appeals to the part of herself she is trying to grow. She waves to Mrs. Kane, the florist across the street, who is rearranging her outdoor plants beneath her awning, and exchanges brief pleasantries with a couple of coffee shop regulars, who are just leaving the narrow, little bookstore on the corner.

Most people, though, do not wish to be out on an evening that feels like it may become a storm, and by the time the sidewalk trails off into dirt, and weeds, and persistent tufts of grass, she is alone. The forest runs along one side of the road, while on the other side, the ground slopes down a long, grassy incline, into a bit of valley before the hills rise again and the forest, in the distance, reappears. Raindrops from recent showers drip from the leaves of dense, close-spaced evergreens, and the air has thick, humid tint to it as it edges into rain again. All around her is the scent of deep, black soil and half-dry mud, the lush promise of new growth in every corner. An abundance of new spring grass, silken green and rain-slick, provides cover for the occasional hint of animal sound, of unknown sounds, like the skittering of claws across bark or the sweet evening song of birds.

The road turns in broad and lazy curves, and the rain clouds darken and merge overhead. Raven takes her time. Her leg hurts less, now, perhaps because winter has at last fallen away, left no hint of itself in the soft warmth and clean rain of the new season, or perhaps because her new brace is her best design yet, or perhaps because the injury was always at its worst when she fought it and railed against it—nonsense she only half believes—but still. She does not push herself. She listens to herself.

She listens to the quiet, nearly inaudible rustling sounds, of the trees, as if of wind in the tall branches at their height, except that all around her is only stillness and the close, undisturbed press of evening against her skin. She wonders at the sorts of animals that may be hidden in the woods. At the sort of queer folk who come out of the woods.

Eventually, the path dips down and turns broadly to the right, and the valley widens, and the grasses grow longer and wilder with thin yellow-green stalks, which always rustle like ghost-song in the wind. There at the bottom of the little hill sits Raven's house. Its white walls nearly glow in the deepening blue-light of evening, as flickers of fireflies dash across the wild lawn in front; the roof is a dark brown that blends with the darkening sky. A walkway of irregular white stones leads from the road to the door, which is separated from the ground by a single, wide concrete step. On the step sits a round, earthen jar with a sickly tomato plant tethered to a stick, the sort of jar under which a less suspicious, less careful person might hide an extra key. But for Raven it is only what is left of the garden she thought she might plant, back in those early and uncertain days right after she moved in.

Instead, she bought a car, more spare parts than working vehicle, and set about restoring it from the inside out. It sits halfway between the house and the slanted gray tool shed, covered with a blue tarp to protect it from the rain.

On the front step, she searches around in her pocket again for the familiar edges of her keys, and thinks that perhaps, beneath the tapping of the raindrops from the leaves, into the dirt and onto the roof and pinging with round little thuds against the tarp, beneath this gathering rain, she can hear a melodic rustling sound, as of laughter hidden behind the palm of a hand.

She looks over her shoulder, once, as quickly as she can. But whatever she is trying to catch is too fast for her, knows this sort of game too well.

Inside, the house smells of wood, soured slightly by a threatening damp, and tinged, to Raven's senses, with the tang of metal. She closes the door behind her, and locks it, then unlocks it again—hangs her keys up by the door, takes off her shoes. The kitchen lies to her right, sparse and clean, the clutter of the living room a series of shadows to her left. She bypasses them both and walks instead all the way to the back of her house, to the narrow rectangle of her bedroom, where she finally turns on the light.

She'll have to eat soon, and shower, and even then it will be early still but for a moment, just to catch her breath and clear her thoughts, she turns on her desk lamp and her bedside lamp, closes the curtains on the dark forest beyond the window, and floods the room with warm and cozy spheres of light. She perches herself on the edge of her bed. She left all of her sheets and blankets behind when she moved—they were all big enough for a queen bed anyway, and too reminiscent of him—and bought replacements, used. They smell like the back of closets, of wooden shelves, of old soap; they're worn and soft and slightly frayed. They feel, perhaps not like her home, but like a home. And the woman who sold them to her gave her, also, a gift: a beautiful patchwork quilt of reds and yellows and blues, too delicate at first for her to dare accept, which lies now across the bed, an object more precious than any she could make with her own hands—and she's made many. She lets her palms rest now on either side of her, against the worn fabric of the quilt. She listens to the slow but steady falling of the rain.

*

Raven wakes abruptly in the middle of the night, to a raging storm outside her window and a weight at the bottom of her bed. Something is pressing insistently against her toe. She jerks upright and scrambles for her bedside lamp. Only then, in the illumination of the scene, does she realize that she is out of breath, rigid with tension in every limb, that her skin is dewy with sweat.

A strange woman is sitting by her feet, her legs tucked neatly under her, her hands not quite settled on her lap. She has long brown hair, which falls in straight sheets to either side of her face, and unnaturally bright skin, faintly luminescent, as the moon seen through a layer of clouds. Raven exhales slowly, and though the sound is lost beneath the echo of the downpour outside, she thinks the woman must hear it, because she leans in a little closer and her own shoulders rise, her chest expands, as if she were inhaling a deep and tentative and expectant breath of her own. Her hands twitch against her knees, and her eyes dart with curious little jumps across Raven's face. She does not speak. Raven wonders at first if she cannot speak, or not in words that Raven herself would understand, just like each of her slight movements seems not precisely to be observed. They are all at once too sudden, as if only consciously restrained, and too fluid, as if made of the air itself. The woman tilts her head to the side, and her hair falls softly against her cheek. She is of the most surreal and exquisite beauty that Raven has ever seen.

"Do you know," the woman says, at last, and Raven jumps, and presses herself farther back against the pillows. The woman's voice rings deeper than she had expected, smooth and rich below the wild deluge of the storm. "Did you know that you have a hole—" She twitches back the quilt and finds Raven's foot again, and pokes at her big toe with that same persistent, eager touch—"in your sock?"

"I hadn't noticed, no."

If the woman hears the note of annoyance in her tone, the deadpan dismissive nature of it, she does not give any sign. She only edges forward a little more, catches Raven's gaze and refuses to let go. "It's right there," she says. "I noticed it. When you stuck your foot out before."

Now that the hole has been brought to her attention, she can feel it, and cannot help but wiggle her toe out through the opening. The woman does not look down but seems to notice the movement anyway, and she laughs, and settles back down on her heels again. Her laugh is beautiful like silver bells. Raven finds herself smiling, despite herself.

"It would bother me so much," the woman says, and then, "I can fix it for you."

Raven considers. She glances down at her feet, both sticking out from under the blankets, and she listens to the white noise of the rain, and she picks out the colors in her quilt and in the slight, well-stitched clothes that the woman is wearing, the streaks of the lamplight in her hair.

Then she narrows her eyes and asks, "What's your name?"

She doesn't entirely expect an answer. The customers she cannot place, they never give themselves away. But the woman only smiles and claps her hands down on her knees and says, "Octavia."

"I'm Raven."

"Raven," Octavia repeats, and the syllables seem to please her. She repeats them a few times, until they start to sound like a delicate, lilting song, cuts herself off at last with a decisive little nod of her head. "Do you want me to fix your sock?"

"No, you don't—you don't have to." She curls herself forward and pulls her socks off, first the marred one and then the other, by the toes. "I have a sewing kit around here somewhere. I can figure it out myself."

"You don't know how?" Octavia seems honestly shocked, and her eyes widen. "You should know how. I can teach you."

"Right now?" The question sounds silly, even spoken in her own voice. She's wide awake anyway. Octavia has taken her socks and is arranging them neatly on her lap. She doesn't seem to hear Raven's hesitation, and after a moment, Raven sighs and says, "All right."

Her initial jolt of fear has dissipated, no more meaningful than the shot of adrenaline that woke her, and even her surprise has settled down into a placid acceptance, in the same way that she accepts everything wild and unusual about her dreams. This could be a dream. But she left her door unlocked, and she lives so close to the woods, and in her little dip of the road there sits only her one little house, so she cannot be shocked if at last someone has followed her home.

And in her dreams, in every tenor of dream, she can still run, her body has no weight to it, her pain isn't real. But now her leg aches as she lifts it over the edge of the bed. She pretends that Octavia isn't watching her, but only massages the stiffness from her muscles and waits, with this new patience she has learned, until she can safely put her weight down on her feet again.

Octavia nudges Raven's slippers toward her. They make a thin sliding sound against the hardwood floor.

"Thanks," Raven says, and leads the way out of the room.

If she does have a sewing kit, lying somewhere about, the most likely place she will find it is in the living room. She snaps on the light and limps her way toward the closet. Octavia, at first only a step behind her, pulls away when she gets her first sight proper sight of the room; without seeing her face, Raven knows her expression is awed and pleased and nearly giddy, can hear all of this in the excited inhale of her breath and the off-tempo pattering of her footsteps. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Octavia stop by her worktable, briefly abandoning the socks in favor of skimming her fingertips across the various half-finished projects sitting there.

Seeing anyone else touch her work would be infuriating, but for some reason, watching Octavia so brightly curious and so careful and so soft, she feels only pride and a sense of curiosity of her own. She finds the sewing kit on the top shelf, takes it down and closes the door. Then she lingers at the edge of the table and waits, following the movements of Octavia's hands, taking in the airy and ever-shifting beauty of her face.

The inventions themselves are mostly nonsense, her attempt at a creative turn. The real work of her car she keeps out in her tiny tool shed, on the other side of the driveway, and here in the domestic space of her home, spare parts and the fruit of surreptitious weekend trades in the village are transformed into sculptures, sometimes, simple machines when she's ambitious. Octavia picks up a small robot of square design, which Raven is teaching to walk, and cradles him reverently in the palm of her hand.

"Strange little creatures," she says, and smiles, and sets it down again.

Then she turns, an inhale of breath and the corner of her lip caught between her teeth, a question poised there on her tongue. Raven expects she will want to know what the other inscrutable inventions are, what they might do. But instead, she takes a step closer and asks, "Before we start, might we eat?"

And Raven finds she has to laugh.

The light in the kitchen reflects off of the yellow floor, the cream countertops, the whites of the walls, so that the room looks brighter and bigger and yet cozier than the crowded living room, with its old olive wallpaper and dark chairs. Octavia seems to step more lightly, here, with a certain twist of unexpected grace. Raven tries to follow the trail of her feet across the tile but loses them in an instant: the sensation of trying to grasp a tune playing weakly in another room. What someone like Octavia might want to eat, she cannot guess. Before she can make an offer, Octavia opens the refrigerator and peers in.

Raven, without asking either, lights a fire on the gas range and puts a kettle on for tea.

"What are these?" Octavia asks, as she pulls a carton from the middle shelf.

"Strawberries," Raven answers. Octavia has already perched herself on the countertop, and started picking among the fruit with a suspicious, though hardly hesitant, touch. "Tea?" Raven adds.

Octavia nods, though in no other way does she even seem to hear the question. "These aren't very... strong," she says, as she bites into one of the berries. Her expression is not wholly approving, but nevertheless she pops the rest of it into her mouth, green leaves and all, and picks up a second, larger, redder one as she chews. "I mean that the taste is rather weak, don't you think? In the Glen, we have the richest, most beautiful berries you could ever imagine. So big you can only hold two, maybe three, in the palm of your hand. Deep-colored like jewels. You can taste them on every little bit of your tongue. We eat them with round, golden-brown sweet cakes, the size of your fist—"

She does not wait to swallow before she speaks, but even with her mouth full, her words distorted by the movements of her teeth, she conjures for Raven a vision so sweet that, for only a moment, she can feel it bursting open on her tongue.

Only the sharp whistle of the kettle rouses her from the dream.

"I suppose these must disappoint," she says, gesturing to the strawberries as she sets two mugs down on the countertop. She drops a bag of green tea into each of them and then she takes the sugar down. Steam rises up in thick curls from the kettle's spout as she pours, and on the other side of it, wafting like watercolors, Octavia shrugs her shoulders up and slowly lets them fall.

"I like your food, too," she says. "What's this?"

"This?" Raven untwists the top of the glass sugar jar. "It's to make the tea a little sweeter. I don't usually add sugar to things, but this tea..." She flicks at the tag at the end of its string. Before the accident, she was never a tea drinker. This one was recommended to her by one of her coffee shop patrons, an herbal remedy for the harder days. It tastes to her untrained palette like dandelions and moss, bitter and earthy like dirt.

Octavia has abandoned the strawberries, is sticking her finger tentatively into the sugar jar. She licks a few crystals off her skin. Raven lifts her eyebrows, but cannot help the deep distraction, the pleasant shivers along her arms, at the sight of that swift dart of light-pink tongue.

"I like this," Octavia declares, and adds three spoonfuls to her mug.

"Oh, you do, huh?" She does not try to hide the note of laughter in her voice, but Octavia gives no sign that she has even heard, let alone taken offense.

Wouldn't it be funny, Raven thinks, if Octavia's tea were now too sweet? She takes a sip, though, and smiles gently, and seems pleased. Curling her hands around the mug, ignoring the handle, she holds it close against her lips and breathes in the sweet and dusky-flower scent of it. She seems to hum lightly just beneath her breath, her eyes half-closed and eyelids fluttering. "Almost like what we have at home," she says. "Except we add nothing to our tea. We drink it out of large, round mugs, at dusk, while we watch fireflies flickering and evening breezes wafting the leaves of the trees and the blades of grass. The mugs are much bigger than this. You have to hold them with both hands. We drop the tea leaves directly in the water and they float, like little rafts across a lake, spring-green and autumn-brown and curling up along their edges as they drift..."

Raven herself might be drifting. Without recognizing the movement of her own hands, she has stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea, collected a mixture of strawberries and blueberries in a green ceramic bowl, and dropped the used spoons with a clatter, which she does not even hear, into the sink. Then she settles again with her hip against the side of the counter and her fingers curled around the handle of her mug, simply listening. She hears the words neither as sounds nor as conjured images but as strains of music, a soft, calm ripple of sound like the run of a tiny stream after a storm.

Octavia flicks her gaze up, meets Raven's eyes, and blinks. She is still holding her mug just against her lips, and the object hides the almost wicked, almost guilty curve of her smile.

"I'm sorry," Octavia says, though she doesn't sound sorry at all.

"Don't be," Raven answers. She finds Octavia's stare again and holds it, her own slightly narrowed: an appraisal, edged with optimism. "Don't be sorry at all."

They take their mugs of tea and the bowl of berries, and return to the living room, where they settle side by side on the couch. When Octavia turns to her, their knees bump against each other, and Raven becomes distinctly aware of the narrow space between them. She watches as Octavia picks up the sewing kit, and Raven's sock, and begins to examine them both, holding the clear plastic kit up to the light, clicking it open, and closed, and then open again, intrigued by the latch at the front. Finally, she pokes around inside for a needle and the right colored thread.

"It's very simple," she says, and slides herself over a little more, so now not only their knees but the sides of their legs press close. Raven just nods. Octavia's presence so near to her works a strain of magic not unlike her words, when she allows herself free reign to speak, so now the stupid little hole in her sock, the tiny little needle in Octavia's hand, seem like only excuses for this: Octavia's hand taking hers, Octavia's fingers gently positioning hers.

"You hold it like this," she continues. "And thread it like this."

She smells like new rain and raw dirt, like the scent of the deepest part of the forest might be, if humans could ever find their way to such an ancient place. Across her cheeks and nose, a glitter of tiny freckles, like fireflies, or the sparks of a campfire, or the most distant stars, gleams haphazardly in the artificial light.

Octavia's arm squashed up against her arm, her hands holding Raven's hands.

It's been a long time since her fingers felt so stiff and awkward, since she had so little an idea of what to do with them. Sewing isn't difficult, but her first stitch runs sideways and too big, nothing like the precise, thin line that Octavia creates. _It's just a sock_ , she tells herself. Yet she feels a moment of frustration, a certain pride when her work improves.

"See?" Octavia says, as she ties off the end and snips the thread. "Very easy." She smooths out the sock across Raven's knee, smiling at the neatly darned hole, glances over at Raven and only then does Raven realize that, at some point, her hand has fallen down to rest on Octavia's knee. She doesn't move it, even as Octavia sets aside the sock and the sewing kit.

"I should thank you for your hospitality," Octavia declares, as she pops a large handful of blueberries into her mouth. This at last, though it does not entirely break the spell, makes Raven laugh.

"You want to thank me?" she asks. "You've just taught me a new skill. That's thanks enough." Thanks enough, she thinks, for invading her bedroom, for eating her food and drinking her tea—but she can't complain. Perhaps she is bewitched, perhaps only the more usual, more ordinary form of entranced. She wants to tuck Octavia's hair behind her ear. She wants the gesture to mean nothing, and to mean everything all at once.

"No, I'm serious. Here—What about—" She leans in, reaches out her hand, and Raven's breath catches briefly in her lungs. A queer woman, she thinks, and a mind-reader too? But Octavia's fingers only slip for a moment behind her ear, and return, a second later, with a bright, golden coin. She lets it fall down into her palm and holds it out for Raven to take.

The coin has inscrutable markings on the front and back, swirls of letters in an unknown tongue. She taps it against the edge of the table. It sounds like any coin: metallic and solid and hard.

Just an old sleight of hand, she tells herself, nothing that she hasn't seen before, a hundred times—yet something about the heavy weight of the coin in her palm still gives her pause. Octavia smiles, clearly gleeful at the awed, slack-jawed look on Raven's face, claps her hands twice as if utterly pleased at her own trick.

"How did you learn to do that?" Raven asks, as lightly as she can, and more for the comfort of speaking than because she needs to know.

"My people are good at magic," Octavia answers. "We play at it all the time at home, just for fun. That's just a simple trick but it's my favorite, you know. Making something out of nothing. A little bit of gold... and then see the way it shines in the light."

As she listens, Raven settles back against the cushions, relaxes there and watches Octavia and the bright, contented expression on her face, listens to the way her voice plays in and out around the sheen of heavy rain outside. "Tell me more," she says, letting her head fall, as if heavy, against the back of the couch, her body twisted on its side and half-curled in. She is not tired. She only feels a graceful calm about her, a slowly unwinding curious mood. "Tell me about your home."

Octavia mirrors her, presses her hands between her knees, leans in close like they're sharing secrets in the latest parts of night. Perhaps they are.

"Oh, it's wonderful there," she says. “In the Glen, the ground is covered in moss, and we walk barefoot so we can feel it soft beneath us with every step. Gigantic tree roots, old as the Earth itself, rise up from the ground, and some of us make our homes in the hollows between them. Others, up in the branches above, which bump and twist and tangle with each other so that, when you're underneath them, and looking up, you can see a pattern of them across the sky. And you've never seen stars like we have in our sky. Giant, dancing, colorful stars. In the summer, the air is warm and soft; you can almost float across it, and the sun shines in broad, orange rays between the trees. And in the winter, light blankets of snow cover the whole Glen, and chilly little breezes sweep snowflakes across your skin, into your hands if you hold them out just so, and then you can see every single one, and each is different from the last. We play music on instruments made from the trees, and flowers, and sometimes from little bits of things we take—just for fun. Everyone knows how to dance and how to sing—"

The steady pattern of her voice cuts off, too abruptly, on a deep inhale, as if the memory of her own home had overwhelmed her, and Raven doesn't think but reaches out and settles her palm across Octavia's wrist.

"We've lived there a long time," she adds, softer now. "So much longer than you could even imagine. And yet some will say that we used to live somewhere else, very, very, very long ago."

"Why are you here?" Raven asks. A part of her is small beneath a sky of brilliant, unruly stars. Her voice comes out little more than a whisper, as if brought forth from far away. "Why did you come all the way here?"

"Oh, I just like to visit sometimes," Octavia says, and smiles. "I've always been curious, you know. About you. And—" She hesitates, and for a moment, her steady gaze dips away from Raven's face. "And I have a brother. A half-brother, who's like you. But I haven't seen him since I was very small. Sometimes I try and look for him." Her mouth thins briefly, the spark in her eyes inscrutable and dim. But before Raven can answer, Octavia squeezes her hand and forces herself to smile.

"What about you?" she asks, and leans in a little closer, so that the question reads like a dare. "Why did you come all the way here?"

"I—?"

For a moment—the thin, sharp inhale of the question, the half-breath of surprise—she wants to ask how Octavia knew. But then, she never thought that she passed as a native, has always felt herself a visitor, foreign and brash and loud, trying to blend herself into the stillness. As out of place as the light, swaying pattern of Octavia's footsteps seem of a piece with the storm and the flurry of the leaves in the wind.

And Octavia herself has lived a long time in this wilderness. She knows who belongs, and who does not.

Raven's been asked before, by her boss at the cafe, by a few regular patrons, why a young woman like herself would want to make her home out here. As if her journey must have been a lengthy one, as if they could read the miles in the features of her face, on her skin. And she's told half-truths and simple lies. She's said what was easy, elided what was difficult.

"I—was in an accident," she says now.

Her voice sounds so low that she barely hears her own words. Octavia shuffles closer, depressing the couch cushions beneath her shifting weight. She doesn't say anything, only nods.

Her large, round eyes are watching Raven, just as they did when she first climbed up onto the foot of Raven's bed.

"A bad one," Raven adds. "And after, everything in my life just—stopped. I had to relearn how to walk. My doctor told me I might not be able to, but I did. This simple thing I'd always taken for granted, I had to work for, I had to devote myself to—" She's never told the story and now it rises in her like another storm; she wants to swallow it down, but it will not be swallowed. It lodges itself in her throat.

"I had a boyfriend," she adds. A tentative confession. She watches Octavia's face for signs of confusion, or judgement, notices nothing except a slight narrowing of her eyes. "Finn. We'd been together since we were kids, and after the accident... he was there. By my side. Every day. But. You know how sometimes when people go through something difficult together, they make it all the way through, and then find that it's destroyed them?"

Octavia shakes her head. She doesn't take her gaze from Raven's face.

"It happens sometimes," Raven says. "With people. He saw me through my recovery: endless physical therapy, several relapses, every single day that I felt hopeless. I needed him. I needed him so much that I resented it, and he liked being needed, and I became his project. And when I was finally functioning again, walking again—"

Her voice, strong and building upon itself, as her strength always builds upon itself, cracks and breaks off without warning. As if all of a sudden, she had nothing else to say. The bluster of the storm fills in the silence: a rage of wind and rain outside her window, a shaking of the glass, a moment's bright lightning flare.

Then only the rain, still wild and steady, and Octavia's hand, settling down at her hip, fingers curling around her hip.

"I just knew he didn't love me anymore. And I didn't love him. And." This feels like a secret too, deeper-buried, wrenched up from the warm soil. "And so I came here because I felt like...I had lost so much, and what was left, was so unimportant. Everything I thought I lived for was… so small.” Her voice sounds small, almost lost beneath the storm. “So I let everything go and started again. I just needed to find out what really mattered.”

"And that led you here?"

Raven nods.

Octavia’s palm, feather-light and moonbeam-soft, starts to glide up along Raven’s hip, across her back—almost an embrace. Perhaps it is this touch, or perhaps the relief of confession itself, of putting into words the desperate longing that has driven her so far, but she perceives at last a stillness deep within her. It echoes, as expansive and as constant as the rain itself, as it expands, cavernous and calm. Her eyelids, heavy now, start to close, and she feels the light touch of fingertips at her jaw. She wonders if Octavia has left the glitter of starlight behind on her skin.

"I think maybe," Octavia, in a hushed but urgent whisper, "you would like the Glen."

To Raven's ear, she sounds excited, nearly giddy: flush and rosy-cheeked with a sudden, beautiful idea.

"Maybe—"

"No."

Raven’s eyes flutter open, just in time catch Octavia biting her lip, shaking her head as she squashes the idea as abruptly as it came. She hardly seems to notice when Raven reaches out and tangles her fingers in Octavia's hair, lets her palm rest against Octavia's cheek. "No, you wouldn't, I don't think. People never do."

Something of a smile, light and dreamy like the distant thoughts Octavia inspires in her, has alighted on Raven’s lips. But now it fades, strangled like first blooms in a late frost. A similar cold fear freezes up over her lungs, through her veins.

_No. People never do._

Dark burdens of clouds and whistling wind bringing shadows to the mossy floor, turning the intricate patterns of tree limbs flat and dark. Beauty imagined or feigned, or simply beyond her ability to understand. Countries to which she may never go.

She forces herself to blink, very fast, opens her mouth to ask what Octavia might mean—but Octavia is already leaning back, pulling away.

Raven sinks back into the corner of the couch. For a moment, she was not sure what she was seeing, the colors of the vision, the manic dancing of the stars—and now she knows only that she has been as if underwater, and she wants to take deep breaths, to get the air into her lungs, and yet she is so tired now. So truly tired. The night has waxed full and the storm has found its rhythm. And Octavia is smiling again as she watches her, though the smile is tinged with sadness and longing, too.

"Let me put your food away," she says, softly, and Raven makes a half-gesture to sit up.

"It's all right—"

"No." She pats Raven's knee. "You've been so kind to me. Let me be kind."

She's closed her eyes again, heavy lids falling down, weighted like her limbs. Like this dream she has been having.

She can hear the clinking of dishes, the sound of footsteps.

*

And some time later, something soft and warm, falling over her. She turns onto her side, wraps herself up in warmth.

*

When Raven wakes, she finds that she is not in her own bed. She's on the couch, curled up around herself, a knitted blanket pulled tightly over her shoulders like a cocoon. Thin, soft, yellow light streams in through the window behind her, early morning pale and diluted by a remnant of breaking clouds, and as she turns onto her back and yawns, she looks up and traces the outlines of it: these wide, dusty slats of light shining on her.

Last night's storm has faded now into a light aftermath of rain, thin and steady against the roof and in the gutters.

She feels sleep-heavy, weighted by strange and marvelous dreams.

But when she reaches her arm out, stretching, feeling every bit of her body and every aching muscle again, her hand hits up against the coffee table, and her fingers fall on a small and unexpected object, sitting at the edge. She picks it up and holds it above her face. It is the little, golden coin from the previous night, just as she remembered it from her lovely and strange little dream, except that it is lighter, and when she scratches at the gold it peels away beneath her nail. Underneath, she sees now, the coin is only candy.

_Something out of nothing. See the way it shines in the light._

Raven sits up, and everything she once knew and once merely wondered snaps into place, and she rips the gold leaf off the candy and holds it, for a moment, in the center of her palm. As if she held the truth itself in the center of her palm.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a flurry of bright blue lights outside the window, dancing, spots of brilliant light through the lazy morning rain. She jumps to her feet. Barefoot and limping, she throws herself down the hall, out the front door, trips down the front steps. The outdoors smells of thick new dirt and raucous growth and grass and weeds and tree leaves sprouting, of mold and moss and mud, and the rain falls over her with steadiness and warmth. "Octavia," she's yelling, yelling as loudly as she can over the rain, "Octavia, Octavia—" until her voice becomes an echo of itself.

The lights, half-dispersed, fall in toward each other again, fall into place, until Octavia is standing on her front walk, blinking at her through the haze and morning mist.

"I can't—" she yells, and Raven shakes her head, runs the last few steps toward her through the soft and clinging mud, and grabs her hands.

And before Octavia can say another word, can protest, or say goodbye, Raven pulls her into an embrace, and kisses her. The sharp-bitter taste of her, the soft and ethereal lightness of her touch, where it wanders across Raven's hip and back, the insistent and close press of her body at the place where hip meets hip, and then the desperate clutch of her hands, all feel, for a moment, definite enough to grasp, real and solid and eternal as stone. Still even as she clings to her, Raven knows that the moment will end and fade and leave behind only a shiver, like an aftershock, through her body, and a strange, raw aftertaste on her tongue.

She knows that if she does not memorize this feeling now, she will never get the chance to learn it again—but she does not want to send herself into madness with longing. She wants to feel, and feel, and feel so completely that the moment is enough—

Then let it go.

Octavia pulls back, smiles at her like a daydream, and kisses her nose. Her skin is shining and wet with rain, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright.

And when she fades, lighter and lighter and then lighter than air, Raven tilts back her head, and looks up into the space where the storm clouds are breaking apart and shifting, making room for the widening rays of the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are always appreciated and replied to (although sometimes it takes me a while...)
> 
> You can find a moodboard for this fic on my tumblr [@kinetic-elaboration](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/618759814377603073/never-contented-things-ravenoctavia-7k-rated-t) and a Fairy!Octavia moodboard [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/189909264190/fairyoctavia-from-never-contented-things-an).


End file.
